Amazing new background removal tool: remove.bg

Every now and then a new photography thread pops up here on CT, and one of the recurring pain points is how to scrub the background out of your coin photos.

A new service just launched called Remove.bg . It uses a machine learning approach to separate a person or product from its background in a photo. My early testing with coins has given excellent results: it works nearly perfect on a uniform background (like an Abafil tray), although it can get a bit confused if a picture of your hand is in the background.

It is free to use from their website. Keen to hear how it works for everyone else!

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

My coin backgrounds aren't completely solid, so I had mixed results, but I think it would work very well for truly solid-color backgrounds. Most of the time I just use the "set transparent color" function in my MS applications, but this site seems to yield a cleaner result.

 

Archilochus, Thanks for the link . I tried the background removal on an antique jade & see that it requires some practice to master.

 

Worked on 2 that I tried, but the backgrounds weren't busy either. Pretty cool.

 

I had success without doing any editing on this Sept. Severus provincial coin.


BEFORE

AFTER

 

I just tried it. Amazingly easy. Thanks

 

All I can say is wow... and thank you!... Just one click and no editing...

 

I couldn't find it, but is there a black background?

 

Wow! This service works incredibly well. I've tried it on coins held in-hand with fingers/etc. on them and it did an impeccable job.

 

Seems pretty cool, and quick. But I tried it twice and it gave me a grey background. How did you guys get white?

 

I'm currently without a decent computer & the ability to use photoshop, so I found one that works online similar to photoshop.

Currently using an 3-year-old chromebook and the one below ones pretty well on this slug.

https://www.photopea.com/

Just use the remove page on this thread then take it and add a black background to it with the link above using a new layer and it's all said and done.

Still, prefer the cleaner look of photoshop but till I get a new computer, the remove webpage and this poor mans online photoshop works well.

It does help to know how to use photoshop with the link above, but it's pretty simple.

 

That's probably just the default color in your photo editor (for example, Mac Preview defaults to gray when the background is actually transparent). I think the images posted by @Al Kowsky and others are just showing the white background of the CoinTalk page.

 

Great service. Easy to use. Thanks!

 

It's a pretty good tool, especially if you have a pretty clean image to start with, but it has its issues. Here is my test.

The unedited photo:


Below is the result from the site. You can see it had problems as my image was rather tight along the edges, so it left a bit behind. Also it could not remove the center too well (admittedly a small issue for most as Chinese coins are not as collected).

The one drawback I could see is that it used a default when resizing the end result photo. Not sure but I assume they use a percentage.


Below is the result of PowerPoint. Its pretty good, but takes a couple to few minutes to accomplish. Also, I can make the image any size I want.

 

Here is one of my results, using a fairly lousy iPhone photo:

BEFORE:


AFTER:

 

Tried it on one coin and it worked great for me. Thanks for the link. Before and after.

 

Oh hey @Bing , I just found out you can click the "Edit" button, right next to the green "Download" button, and insert your own background color:

 

I take my photos with my hand holding the coin, so it obviously has some issues with that.


But Ken previously shared his Powerpoint functionality (trick) and I've been able to use that quite successfully even with tough/busy backgrounds (like having my hand in there).

 

That worked really well for me. I thought my old gnarled table would give it issues, but it didn't.